From a Home Kitchen to a Sevenoaks Farm: Eat'n'Mess Has Outgrown Its Own Queues

Eat'n'Mess is a fully gluten-free bakery and café now running from The Pod, an outdoor space built from converted shipping containers and timber decking at Turvins Farm Dairy near Dunton Green, Sevenoaks. It's grown from a one-woman stall at a London market into a place popular enough that turning up on a sunny weekend usually means joining a queue.

By its own account, Eat'n'Mess started in 2013 in founder Danielle's home kitchen, selling bakes at Greenwich Market and later Broadway Market in London. While dealing with her own food intolerances, she found a gap for gluten-free bakes that didn't taste like an afterthought, reworked her recipes to be fully gluten-free, and built a following. A 2016 Kickstarter campaign funded the business's first shop, which opened on the Sevenoaks high street that October. It stayed there until July 2021, when it closed and moved to what is now The Pod, next to its bakery at Turvins Farm Dairy - trading a town-centre unit for a working farm.

The kitchen is 100% gluten-free with no cross-contamination, and also covers dairy-free, nut-free and vegan options, serving breakfast, brunch and lunch. It's walk-in only - no bookings - with online orders for collection picked up from the adjacent bakery rather than The Pod itself. Normal hours are Monday to Saturday, 7:30am to 4pm, and Sunday 9am to 4pm (hot food finishes at 3pm); the covered area has sides and heating for winter. It's dog-friendly, has free parking and a bike stand, and takes card only, not cash.

The popularity isn't just a local impression - it shows up independently. Wanderlog's guide to Sevenoaks notes the cafe "gets extremely busy and the queues can take forever but worth the wait," and it's rated 4.6 out of 5 from well over a hundred reviews on Tripadvisor. Chocolate supplier Callebaut, profiling the business as one of its trade customers, describes it simply as "a fast growing cafe." None of that is surprising for a weekend-only queue, but it does mean turning up outside peak times - or on a weekday morning - is the easier way to actually get a table.

Eat'n'Mess isn't the only business putting Turvins Farm Dairy back to work. Turvins Farm Shop, selling local meat, bread, fruit and veg, now also trades from the site, and Jonomade Distilling has a unit there too. It's the kind of small-scale cluster that's easy to miss unless you're actually driving down Sundridge Road - a working farm building that, not that long ago, wasn't the kind of place you'd plan a visit to, now home to three separate independent businesses drawing people off the main road. Source: Eat'n'Mess